The New Retirementality: Planning Your Life and Living Your Dreams...at Any Age You Want, 4th Edition

Chapter 2

Removing Artificial Finish Lines

“Most people say when you get old you have to give things up, but I think we get old because we give things up.”

—Theodore Green (Senator Green was 98 when he retired in 1966.)

Whether you are 62, 65, or some other age at which you’ve been told you should retire, that number is nothing more than an artificial finish line. Only you have the right to announce a verdict on your date of extraction. The employment of your skills, competencies, and ideas should be for as long as you desire. None of us comes into this world with “use by” dates stamped on our backs. As long as we enjoy utilizing our competencies and truly love what we do, we should never quit the race. We may slow our pace or change the event we run in, but we should never stop participating.

Do you really want to quit working? Sadly, because so many people are working in jobs, industries, and offices they hate, they have convinced themselves that the answer is to stop working (aka, retirement). But the fact remains that most of us wouldn’t be obsessed with the idea of quitting if we were doing what we wanted to do in the first place.

Many of us don’t like the circumstances we find ourselves in—we feel stuck. We feel the only remedy is to quit working. This is akin to getting a frontal lobotomy because of a headache. Maybe the real truth is that you want to quit what you are currently doing to be able to do something else; you need or want a change but are convinced that you need ...